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The energy around the table shifted as the ladies tried to remember the past, while still keeping their hands busy.

“Oh, there were quite a few of us,” Edith said. “It was a real competition in those days. Cash prize and everything.”

“How much?” Emily asked, pen ready.

“Twenty-five hundred,” Mrs. C. said. “Which was worth considerably more twenty years ago than it is today. People wanted to win.”

“Who entered?”

The list came together piece by piece. Nana’s sugar and spice cookies. Mr. Alders’ spice cake. Alice’s iced gingerbread cookies. Norma’s Victoria sponge, which Mrs. C. described as passable in a tone that suggested she was being generous. Three or four others Emily didn’t recognize.

The town grew as the names emerged. Kit joined two walls of the bakery. Edith tiled the hardware store roof with cinnamon cereal squares. Mrs. C. painted dark windowpanes onto the miniature library while Emily recorded every detail.

“And Douglas Merritt,” Edith said, pressing a tiny gingerbread chimney into place.

Emily looked up. “Who?”

“Mayor Bloomfield’s half-brother,” Mrs. C. said. “Different fathers. He went by Merritt, not Bloomfield.”

“I didn’t know the mayor had a brother,” Kit said.

“Half-brother,” Edith corrected. “And they don’t speak. Haven’t for years.” She stood back to assess the chimney. “Douglas was a difficult young man. Very competitive. He’d entered the bake-off every year for six years without winning. Your grandmother beat him every single time.”

“He needed the money,” Mrs. Bishop said, and then looked as if she hadn’t intended to say it quite that loudly.

Everyone looked at her. Kit held the gingerbread wall.

“Well,” she said, slightly pink, “he did. He’d borrowed rather a lot from various people around town. A cash prize would have helped him considerably.”

Emily was writing fast. “Was he there that day? At the bakery?”

“In and out all morning,” Mrs. C. said, with certainty. She added a dot of brown food coloring to a window frame. “He kept asking your grandmother about her recipe. Very persistent. She kept redirecting him with what I can only describe as practiced grace.”

“And he left town shortly after that Christmas,” Edith added. “Fairly suddenly, as I recall.”

“Has anyone spoken to him about it? About the theft?” Emily asked.

The table looked at each other over the gingerbread rooftops of Oak Way.

“I don’t imagine anyone has spoken to Douglas Merritt about anything in nearly twenty years,” Mrs. C. said. “He was not a popular man when he left.”

“Where is he now?”

“Florida,” said Edith. “Last I heard.”

Emily wrote that down.

Florida. Douglas Merritt. Needed money. Six failed attempts. Had access. Left town abruptly.

She looked at the gingerbread Maple Falls taking shape along the counter—Oak Way in miniature, every storefront rendered in careful detail, the hardware store standing at the end of the row—and thought about a seventeen-year-old secret that was still out there, still waiting.

She closed her notepad and reached for the piping bag again.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s get this town finished.”

Kit slid the miniature fire station toward her, its red doors waiting to be attached. Emily stared at it for half a second too long.

Because once this was finished, she had plans with a very sexy fireman.